Working Papers
Unpaid domestic work continues to fall largely on women, despite their growing presence in the workforce. This paper asks whether policies changing the relative bargaining position of spouses can disrupt this pattern. I use the introduction of a bachelor tax in fascist Italy to show that altering men’s incentives to marry shaped the allocation of domestic work. Men in tax-induced marriages took on more domestic work, while their wives gained time, agency, and better economic outcomes. Effects are long-lasting and transmitted across generations: women raised in households with more equitable labor divisions also perform less housework. The findings suggest shocks in bargaining power can loosen the hold of social norms and reconfigure domestic life.
This paper studies the labor market effects of a large payroll tax cut targeting female hires in Italy. Using matched employer-employee data, I find that firms retain most of the subsidy, reducing labor costs without raising wages for subsidized workers. The subsidy alters job matching, enabling women to sort into jobs with better non-wage amenities, but lower pay. Firms use the savings to expand and raise incumbent earnings, with men benefiting more through rent-sharing and stronger labor supply responses. Overall, the subsidy strengthens women’s labor market attachment and nearly recoups its fiscal cost, but it can exacerbate gender pay gaps.
CESifo Working Paper No. 9671; VistINPS Working Paper 2022/47; UNIL Working Paper No. 2022/01; Upjohn Institute Working Paper No. 23-386.
Media coverage & policy reports: Il Foglio; Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance Report on Gender Inequalities ("Bilancio di Genere 2022"), p. 52-55; inGenere; Lavoce; Quotidiano Nazionale; Domani; Upjohn Institute Policy Brief.
Awards: 2022 IIPF Young Economist Award; 2022 ``Carlo Dell'Arringa" Young Labor Economist Award; 2020 Early Career Research Award (W.E. Upjohn Institute)
This paper presents evidence of market externalities of tax evasion: firms’ tax non-compliance distorts the outcomes of their competitors. Using novel administrative data on the universe of Italian firms, we compute a tax evasion proxy as the fraction of individual firms that manipulate their revenue to meet eligibility criteria for preferential tax regimes. Our empirical approach uses policy-induced changes in tax notches’ size to predict the fraction of non-compliant firms in each market. We find that non-compliant firms lead to significant revenue and productivity losses for their competitors, who then pass on some of this burden to their workers. This unfair competition harms aggregate productivity, partly due to a worsening of allocative efficiency. Our findings show that cracking down on tax evasion not only increases tax revenue and promotes tax fairness, but can also enhance market efficiency by leveling the playing field.
[Updated 2025-05] Tax Notches and Household Labor Supply: Evidence from the Italian Spouse Tax Credit (with Tommaso Giommoni)
Most tax system provides tax incentives based on spousal earnings. How do such policies affect economic behavior within the household? We study an Italian policy that grants a generous tax credit to main earners if their spouses, officially labeled as “dependent spouses” by law, earn below a cutoff. Using administrative tax data, we find sharp bunching at this notch among second-earner women, but no comparable response among second-earner men. This asymmetry is not explained by gender differences in occupational sorting or financial incentives. Instead, it appears consistent with gender identity costs: the “dependent spouse” label aligns with traditional female roles, but conflicts with male identity norms. Women, particularly in more gender-conservative contexts, persistently reduce their income and forgo job opportunities to preserve policy eligibility. Our findings suggest that gender identity norms can act as optimization frictions that influence household behavior when interacting with gender-blind tax design.
We study the impact of taxation on location choices. We leverage recent tax decentralization reforms in Italy, which granted regions and municipalities greater power in setting income tax rates across brackets. Combining granular micro-level data on tax residence transfers with tax rate variations within and across locations, we show that taxation significantly shapes location decisions. The mobility response varies greatly across the income distribution, with a higher response among the top incomes. This response purely reflects a tax residence transfer, rather than job mobility. Our estimates imply that revenue losses due to tax mobility are small, making local redistribution feasible.
This paper analyzes the determinants of the labor-capital split in national income for 20 countries since the late 1800s. Our main identification strategy focuses on unique historical quasi-experimental events: i) the introduction of universal suffrage, ii) close election wins of left-wing governments, iii) decolonization, iv) unionization shocks, and v) wars. We also run instrumented panel regressions. Our findings show that the capital share decreased in response to radical institutional and political shifts, such as the introduction of universal suffrage in the early 1900s, the undoing of colonialism and the implementation of redistributive policies during the post-war period. By contrast, the capital share increased following the erosion of trade unionism since the 1980s. Wars, despite destroying the capital stock, generated windfall profits that increased the capital share.
Publications
The Impact of Socioeconomic Factors on the Incidence and Characteristics of First-Episode Psychosis. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Science 34, e45, 1–14, 2025 (with Belvederi Murri M, Onofrio A, Punzi C, et al.)
Aims: The environment shapes the risk of psychosis. In particular, urbanicity, deprivation or inequality, migrant density and cannabis availability may not only influence psychosis incidence, but also the characteristics of individuals who arrive at clinical services. This study examined how socioeconomic factors influence the incidence and characteristics of cases of First-Episode Psychosis (FEP).
Methods: We analyzed prospective data collected from the FEP early detection program of Emilia-Romagna, a high-income Italian region. Participants were 1240 individuals aged 18–35 years, who presented at the public healthcare services for a FEP. Exposures were derived from area-level data of 331 municipalities. We used population density, socioeconomic deprivation, educational deprivation, economic inequality, migrant density (proportion of migrants), frequent cannabis use (proportion of people aged 15–19 years old who reported frequent cannabis use). Outcome measures were FEP incidence (cases/100,000 inhabitants at risk per year) and characteristics (age of onset, migrant status, unemployment, substance use, treatment lag [DUP], family and resource problems). We reviewed pertinent literature and formulated a Directed Acyclic Graph to present causal assumptions and provide adjustment sets for Bayesian spatial and multilevel models of social causation. To compare the effects of different exposures, we computed Average Marginal Effects and report the outcome changes that correspond to one standard deviation change of the exposure, incidence rate ratios (IRR), or odds ratios (OR).
Results: The exposures and incidence of FEP displayed heterogeneous spatial distribution, with no spatially organized pattern. Accordingly, incidence and characteristics were best modelled as non-spatial, three-level hierarchical models. The incidence of FEP was influenced by population density (IRR, 1.14; 95% CrI, 1.03; 1.29), educational deprivation (IRR, 1.15; 95% CrI, 1.02; 1.31) and frequent cannabis use (IRR, 1.31; 95% CrI, 0.98; 1.82), more than socioeconomic deprivation. Higher migrant density in an area shortened the DUP on average by 3.4 months (95% CrI, −1.122; 0.76), while an increase of cannabis use of one standard deviation increased the DUP of 12.9 months (95% CrI, −2.86; 6229). Socioeconomic deprivation increased the likelihood of FEP cases being substance users (OR, 1.12; 95% CrI, 1.01; 1.26), while population density decreased it (OR, 0.91; 95% CrI, 0.83; 1.00).
Conclusions: Area-level socioeconomic features affect both the incidence and the characteristics of FEP, including the probability of individual being migrants, substance users or having a different DUP. Educational deprivation may function as a proxy for culture- or cognitive-related factors. Area-level socioeconomic data may inform public healthcare strategies for early identification and availability of tertiary clinical services.
Austerity Harmed Student Achievement. The Economic Journal 134: 659, 1199-1227, 2024 (with Caterina Pavese)
This paper shows that austerity spending cuts harmed student performance in standardised national tests. To identify this relationship, we use cross-municipality variation in the timing of eligibility for the Italian Domestic Stability Pact as an exogenous shifter of local public spending. We then compare test scores for students that were from the same municipality, but who were exposed to different levels of austerity cuts based on their birth year. Combining administrative data on public spending and test scores with an instrumental variable model, we show that the test score impact from austerity spending cuts is around 5.1% of a standard deviation in math and 4.6% in reading. These effects are more pronounced for children with limited resources at home. We provide suggestive evidence that school budget cuts account for most of the observed test score impact.
Media coverage: Lavoce; RAI 3 radio interview (from 01:35:00)
In contexts with weak enforcement, the threat of tax evasion may constrain policy makers’ power to set tax policies optimally. This paper studies whether stricter tax enforcement affects the tax schedule set by local governments. I take advantage of an Italian policy that generated cross-municipality variation in the scope for tackling income and property tax evasion through stricter tax enforcement. Combining an event-study design with municipality-level panel data on statutory tax rates, I show that stricter tax enforcement tips the balance in favor of higher marginal tax rates for middle and top incomes, while the poor benefit of a lower marginal tax rate. The tax hike is larger in places with higher pre-program inequality and where intrinsic tax compliance attitudes are weaker. As a result of higher tax revenue, municipalities hire more workers and raise public spending. These results suggest that tax enforcement policies have not only the power to foster tax capacity, but also to enhance the ability to pursue redistributive policies.
Knocking on Parents' Doors: Regulation and Intergenerational Mobility. The Journal of Human Resources 57(2): 525-554, 2022 (with Sauro Mocetti and Giacomo Roma)
We study the effect of regulation on intergenerational mobility exploiting the impact of two reforms occurred in Italy since the 2000s. We built an OECD-style indicator of strictness of regulation for 14 occupations and three cohorts (that is, before and after each reform) to leverage the effect of regulation among occupations and over time. We find that relaxation of regulation has affected the propensity to follow the parents’ career, which is our proxy for occupational persistence. The impact is driven by variation of anticompetitive conduct rules rather than entry requirements. Regulation distorts the career choices significantly more among less able children.
Tax Progressivity and Top Incomes: Evidence from Tax Reforms. The Journal of Economic Inequality 18(3): 261-289, 2020 (with Daniel Waldenström)
We study the link between tax progressivity and top income shares. Using variation from Western tax reforms in the 1980s and 1990s and synthetic control method estimation, we find that reductions in tax progressivity had large and lasting positive impacts on top income shares. The effects are largest within the top percentile and almost zero in the lower half of the top decile, and all results are robust to different model specifications, placebo tests in time and space, and controlling for other contemporaneous reforms. Searching for mechanisms, we find that the effects seem to operate mainly through reductions in top marginal tax rates and that the share of capital income in top incomes increased after the reforms, indicating that tax avoidance behavior could explain some of the observed effects.
Trends and Gradients in Top Tax Elasticities: Cross-Country Evidence, 1900-2014 International Tax and Public Finance 26(3): 457–485, 2019 (with Daniel Waldenström)
We construct a cross-country dataset spanning 1900–2014 to estimate the tax elasticity of top incomes. Our results show that top tax elasticities vary tremendously over time; they were medium to low before 1950, dropped to almost zero during the postwar era and increased to unprecedented levels since 1980. We document a marked income gradient of increasing tax responsiveness at the top. Tax avoidance, especially income shifting between wage and capital income, appears to be one important driver of these patterns. Wars, financial crises, and country-specific effects and trends also have a bearing on top elasticities.
Media coverage: VoxEU